Reality and Fantasy
by the ramblin rose
Summary: Caryl AU. Oneshot. All fantasy, in one way or another, was borne from reality. Caryl.


**AN: This is from the Tumblr prompt of meeting in a coffee shop. It's Daryl and Carol.**

 **I own nothing from the Walking Dead.**

 **I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!**

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Coffee. With Cream. And sugar. Enough sugar that it came in just a step below candy. Liquid, drinkable, creamy, coffee-flavored candy.

Five minutes of negotiation over the state of his coffee and the man finally accepted the cup, watched it like he expected it to slosh everywhere and cause second degree burns, and walked toward the sitting area in the small café. He glanced around, stopping his steps entirely, for a moment and then proceeded to choose a spot, alone, at a small table.

Carol was watching him with absolutely no shame or remorse. She was at the Perfect Percolation every morning without fail and she watched everyone that came through. It was research, really. Sometimes coming up with a character could be the most difficult part of the next novel. It wasn't so hard to tell a story—pick the bits and pieces here and there as she went along—and things flowed once she was going. Finding the right people to get things going, though? That was the challenging part.

So every day she was in the coffee shop not a quarter of an hour after it opened. She got the same thing every single day. The bottomless "Coffee Pot" special—whatever flavor it might be that day. She sat in the same place, too. There was a perfect amount of sun there. It was warm from the light but not too hot. The lighting was ideal for writing, when writing was what she was doing, or for observing when she was mapping characters.

She hadn't come, this morning, looking for a new character, but the man had drawn her attention.

He wasn't a regular. In fact, it almost looked like he'd never been in a coffee shop before. He seemed almost overwhelmed by the possibility when he'd been trying to order and he'd neared frustration more than once.

This was a man who made his own coffee.

He was ruggedly handsome. He had the appearance of someone who had spent at least a somewhat significant amount of time working outside. He was good looking enough that it would be easy to imagine that he had a wife somewhere, perhaps a few children—more than likely teenagers or close to it, judging by his age. However, it was likely that he was single. He was accustomed to making his own coffee and nobody had told him that his shirt was half untucked and could use an ironing.

He was fairly well-dressed. Judging by his appearance, he was probably better dressed than he normally would have been, left to his own devices, and that led Carol to believe that his morning appearance at the coffee shop was a meeting of sorts. That and, of course, the fact that he'd scanned the space with his eyes like he was looking for someone and chosen a spot where he could have a fairly unobstructed view of the door.

Maybe it was a business meeting. Or maybe it was a date. It could be that he'd been, in his younger years, something of a confirmed bachelor, but now he was trying to settle down. Maybe he'd met a nice woman online—that was popular these days. Or perhaps some well-meaning friends had fixed him up on a blind encounter with a woman that they knew was perfect for him, even if they were only basing that perfection on the mere fact that she, too, was single.

Carol prided herself, these days, on being an exceptional judge of character. She could, in a matter of a few short moments of interaction with someone, tell almost anything that she wanted to know about them. She could read people exceptionally well. She could see things that they were trying to hide, even. It was almost like something belonging to intuition.

Except it wasn't really intuition. She hadn't always had the ability to read people well. Maybe, if it had been something innate to her, she might have saved herself a great deal of strife in her life.

But maybe that very strife was what had given way to the intuition.

The man that sat, sipping at too hot coffee and continuously scanning the room with his eyes in search of whoever he might be waiting for, seemed like a nice enough man. There was nothing about him that immediately got Carol's attention as being threatening in any way. The way he sat, in fact, made him more endearing than anything. He looked uncomfortable. He looked uncomfortable with his clothing. He looked uncomfortable with the location. He even looked slightly uncomfortable with the coffee that he was nursing.

He was the kind of man, perhaps, that Carol would want to speak to, but she was very much like him in that things made her uncomfortable. Particularly men made her uncomfortable.

She didn't hate them, of course. She wrote about them all the time. The men that filled the pages of the novels that she produced were all kind men. They were all good mean. They were dedicated lovers, loyal husbands, tender companions, and beloved fathers. The men that she drew from—like the very man in the coffee house—for inspiration were likely not entirely unpleasant individuals, but they could never live up to the fictional counterparts that Carol created.

She feared, too, that if she were to venture outside of her created realms and actually speak to the men that she studied for her characters, she would find nothing more than disappointment. She would find nothing more than the absolute shattering of the thin and delicate belief she'd built that some men could be just as she dreamed they might be.

She couldn't handle that.

She'd worked so hard, for so long, to overcome things that had happened in her life. She'd put personal effort into convincing herself that her ex had been one of the bad men and that her judgment, in her youth, was poor. She'd been unable to see it then. She'd been naïve and filled with the need to believe that people could change. Now she no longer had that feeling. She felt that people changed, of course, because she'd undergone many changes in her life, but she didn't believe that some traits were able to be manipulated.

Through her personal journey of recovery, she'd started writing. The first novel that she'd sold hadn't done too much for the world at large, but it had healed a part of her. There were people out there. There were, as she liked to believe, good people that cared about her and cared about what she had to say and what she thought and dreamed. There were people that, very much unlike her ex, weren't interested in telling her to sit quietly in the corner that he made for her.

And the second book had done better and brought more confidence. Each one after that had healed a little more of Carol's soul.

Each one, too, had taught her to be more thoughtful about people. It had taught her to be a careful, thorough, and good judge of character. The books had taught her that good men existed and that there were, if her novels were any true image of society, more of them than there were of the evil men.

She hadn't actually tested any of her studies in life, however. She'd kept to herself, for the most part, since she'd left her husband so many years before. Her social interactions were limited to her daughter, who was quite grown and didn't need her now like she once did, and a few good friends—always female and always good people—with whom she shared her life. She had gotten away from men because she feared the deconstruction of her new belief system. She feared that she would meet a man, read him wrong, and he would, in the blink of an eye, destroy everything she'd worked so hard to create.

She missed men.

She craved intimacy, like she assumed that most people did. And, every now and again, she'd found other avenues for a much needed dose of intimacy, but she missed men.

She fed her feelings with the books with that she wrote. She fed them with the characters that reminded her that men were wonderful and love and romance and happiness were within the reach of everyone, no matter what. They reminded her that it was all within her reach.

Except she was never doing any such reaching.

At her age, it was embarrassing to admit fear out loud, so she kept it to herself. Every now and again she was pressed about it, by some well-meaning soul-sister in her life, but she avoided admitting that it was fear that drove her to her solitude. Instead she made up other flowery descriptions for it and she praised her single life and all the glory of her solitary existence.

She kept the fear to herself, locked away.

If a man, just like the man sipping coffee, were to ruin her carefully constructed image of what kinds of men there might be out there—somewhere in the world? It would take away her ability to write them because she'd no longer believe them herself. At least, as it stood, she could believe that she wasn't writing fairy tales. She was writing ideal situations, perhaps, but not fairy tales. If they destroyed her image, though, then the men she wrote would seem no more real to her than unicorns.

The writing had saved her, in many ways, and it had helped her bring herself back from a place that she remembered as being dark and cold and lonely.

To lose it would be to lose a part of herself that she couldn't bear to be without. Certainly, she couldn't risk losing that for the chance that she might, in some man that crossed her path and was converted to a list of characteristics and a personality map, find someone for her real life that was every bit as good as any of the men that she created.

She flipped to a clean page in the yellow legal pad that she kept in front of her and she started to sketch out details about the man that she'd been observing for some part of the morning. What he looked like came easily enough. That was always the simple part. Then she made careful notes about who she though he was, who he might have been, and how he might have arrived to be sitting in the coffee shop that morning. She wrote, for herself, a short and quick paragraph about why the man might be there and who he might be meeting—for he was surely meeting someone—and then she jotted down some ideas about a universe in which he might thrive and might find the life that she had planned for him. She thought about what kind of life he might like—a life that she might like, because every one of her characters held a piece of her heart.

She glanced up, while she was writing out her list, two or three more times to observe the man. He continued on with the coffee, the lift of his hand showing that he was working his way through the cup and would soon finish with the beverage, and bounced a leg with the anxiety that he was clearly feeling. He continued to look for someone who didn't come, his eyes only skating over Carol when he scanned the rest of the place as if he were assuring himself that he hadn't somehow missed the person that he was expecting.

Finally, his phone sounded—nothing more than a generic ring tone—and in a somewhat frantic move to stop it before it disturbed anyone, he nearly dropped it on the floor before fumbling to answer it. A short conversation later, to which Carol didn't listen because, even if she observed, she tried to give people their privacy, and the man hung up the phone.

He stood up, returned the phone to his pocket, and drained the contents of the cup. Clearly he was being stood up. A possible business deal had fallen through or been postponed. A friend had a flat tire or a last minute engagement and cancelled meeting for coffee to catch up on old times. A possible blind date had come down with a headache at the last minute and had called the whole thing off. The possibilities for what had happened were endless, but the end result remained the same. The man made uncomfortable by a simple cup of coffee was leaving. His trip, though not fruitless for Carol, had been entirely fruitless for him.

He started, then, toward the door and Carol diverted her eyes as he walked in her direction, her spot not far from where he had come in and where he would exit.

She jumped, her whole body quaking, when there was movement of her table. A quick glance to the side and she could see the scuffed brown shoes of the man. She looked up at him, hoping his inquiry might be nothing more than some request for where a street or another was located.

He was staring at her. He had amazing blue eyes, even if they were somewhat obstructed by salted hair in need of a trim and heavy lids that showed his age and the time he'd spent in the sun. She'd have to jot that down as soon as he left.

As an instinct, she remembered to reach and draw the legal pad toward her. Folding her arms across it, she blocked it from his view as much as she possibly could.

"You need something?" The man asked.

Carol furrowed her brows at him. She started to stammer out a request for clarification, but she was interrupted by him offering her just that.

"You been looking at me a lot," he said. "Did you—need something?"

"I thought—I thought I knew you," Carol offered, thinking as quickly as she could. "From somewhere. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."

He laughed quietly in his throat and glanced around the coffee shop once more before he settled his eyes on her.

"You didn't, just...wondering," he said. "I'm Daryl. I don't think I know you. Think I mighta remembered you if I did."

"Why?" Carol asked, relaxing a little more of the tension in her shoulders with the easy nature of the conversation. It had the potential to be confrontational, but it didn't seem that he was interested in that in the slightest.

He laughed to himself at that too and then shook his head to dismiss it.

"Nothing," he said. "Just—good at remembering people. What'd you say your name was again?" He added the last part as though it were an afterthought entirely.

"I didn't," Carol said. "But—it's Carol. I'm Carol."

Daryl hummed.

"Sorry," he said. "But I don't think I know you."

"It's nothing to be sorry about," Carol offered quickly.

A half smile appeared on his lips and he hummed to himself once more.

"Maybe it is, maybe it isn't," he said, lowering his voice almost like he wasn't sure if he wanted her to hear it or not. "You sure you don't need something?" He asked again, this time raising his voice back to its normal volume.

"No," Carol said, shaking her head. "Thank you—but no."

He nodded and glanced around again like he still wasn't sure that whoever he'd been waiting on, whoever he'd been alerted wasn't coming, might not walk in at any minute.

"Well, alright then," Daryl said. "You—uh—have a nice day?"

"You too," Carol offered quickly.

With as much interest as she'd watched him have his coffee, Carol watched Daryl leave the coffee shop. From the window, she watched as he got in a two-tone green and white truck, and she watched as he drove away.

She sighed to herself, jotted down the remaining facts on the legal pad that she wanted to remember, and scribbled another note for herself.

 _Coffee shop. He asks if she needs anything. She says yes._


End file.
